Next Cafe: The Mindfulness Movement – History, Ethics, & Politics

For over one hundred years, peoples of predominantly European and Anglo-American societies – the Western countries of the ‘Global North’ – have turned to Asian-derived mind-body practices and training regimes, such as meditation, as therapeutic ways of living with rapid socio-economic change and political turmoil. Mindfulness, or Buddhist sati, is a case in point. Emerging out of complex, inter-cultural ‘exchanges’ – notably British colonial expansion in Southeast Asia – mindfulness meditation, or Buddhist vipassana, now features as a prominent feature of the globalised self-help scene, therapeutic culture and ‘happiness industry’.